A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Corporate (41 quotes)
The corporate image is the most involving of effects for it is really made up of public attitudes.
“Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age”, 1968, p 78
Year: 1968
Notice, the electric surround of information that has tended to make man a superman at the same time reduces him into a pretty pitiable nobody by merging him with everybody. It has extended man in a colossal, superhuman way, but it has not made individuals feel very important.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 21
Year: 1951
Why aren't you interested in the private lives of the strippers and pulp artists who upholster our desert landscape?
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 151
Year: 1951
But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us — indeed, compelling us — to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 56, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 237
Year: 1969
The unconscious that had long been the environment of consciousness has become the content of modern artistic awareness.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes” , (1966), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p 9
Year: 1966
In contrast to phonetic letters, the ideograph is a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a mask of corporate energy.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 39
Year: 1968
On the social level the masterful use of colloquial cliché as corporate mask to archetypalize the members of the private party.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 183
Year: 1968
Drawn to McLuhan #13
A new poetic, or musical, rhythm is a vortex of corporate energy.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 183
Year: 1968
For liturgy calls for a considerable degree of immersion of the private psyche in the corporate life, just as it demands a "putting on" of group image.
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 17, reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 121
Year: 1973
As new technologies come into play, people become less and less convinced of the importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 123
Year: 1967
Inevitably, as our electronic technology has extended not simply our bodies but also our nervous systems, we have become more deeply involved in other lives as portions of our own “unconscious.”
“The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” In The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication (1967), p 41 NB: This work is a variation of the 1966 article of the same title.
Year: 1967
Everybody at a football game is nobody simply by virtue of the fact of their deep involvement in an experience simultaneously shared by many others. In such a situation, the most famous person in the world becomes a nobody. This is a structural fact, and when considered in relation to our wired planet, where everybody is involved in everybody’s experience, this is the overwhelming backlash of reduction to nonentity – the creation of mass man. The mass man is not the vulgar or the stupid or the unthinking man, but anybody and everybody who experiences the electric situation of instant information. Electronic man is no abstraction, but rather the existing individual in a simultaneous culture. Having had his private individuality erased anonymously, he is paranoiac and much inclined to violence, for violence is a quest for identity, seeking to discover, “Who am I?” and ‘What are my limits?”
Speech at the Conference on Management Information Systems” (1971), transcript
Year: 1971
A ball game or a bull fight on TV is, naturally, a TV experience. For those at the game or the fight, the content of the game or fight primarily consists of the corporate user.
“The Almighty User”, in Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, Midwest Magazine, May 23, 1971, p 28
Year: 1971
So far as the present book is concerned, it is not helpful to talk about the unconscious as the domain of the unknown, or as an area more profound than ordinary consciousness.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), 245
Year: 1962
Even a restricted consciousness is far more interesting than the unconscious profound.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), 245
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Unconscious
Anyhow, Darwin broke up anthropocentric consciousness just as Copernicus had done for space. Yet till Freud, man somehow clung to some scrap of intuition of consciousness as tinged by spontaneity. But Freud ended that by his image of mind as ripple on the ocean of unconsciousness.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 251
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Unconscious
That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconsciousness of collective man.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 269
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Unconscious
Twiggy and the Beatles are not irrelevant to the understanding of these changes. They are not so much private people as corporate images.
“On Christmas”, in McCall’s magazine, December, 1967
Year: 1967
Simply because they are, as I can see, accurate reports. I simply say Twiggy is icon, Twiggy is a non-visual entity, is an abstract art form. There were some other art objects around her very much like Twiggy. Picasso and Twiggy have much in common, so has she much in common with Bucky Fuller. The dome of Bucky is an auditory dome. Twiggy is a tactile, auditory object, not visual. When you pull out all the connections between spaces, you have an icon, you have a sculpture. And this is Twiggy; she´s sculpture.
“7 O’Clock Show”, CBC, TV Interview with Bob Quintrell, October 16th, 1967, audio transcript, 04:11
Year: 1967
…the little epic [epyllion] as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is 'the tale of the tribe'. That is to say, it is not so much a story of the individual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 95
Year: 1970
One must flip instead into role-playing, which means submergence in corporate situations.
Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, March 26, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 494
Year: 1974
Perhaps it was the Kennedy funeral that most strongly impressed the audience with the power of TV to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation. No national event except in sports has ever had such coverage or such an audience. It revealed the unrivaled power of TV to achieve the involvement of the audience in a complex process. The funeral as a corporate process caused even the image of sport to pale and dwindle into puny proportions. The Kennedy funeral, in short, manifested the power of TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process. By comparison, press, movie and even radio are mere packaging devices for consumers.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 337
Year: 1964
The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 292
Year: 1964
But [T.S.] Eliots [sic] "consciousness" is not that of a lover, a count, or a distinct individual—it is impersonal and universal and instead of ranging over individual associations he ranges over all history and all modern society.
Letter to Elsie, Herbert, and Maurice McLuhan, Dec 6th, 1934, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 43
Year: 1934
Yet whether one uses the press for privacy in public conveyances, or for involvement in the communal while enjoying privacy, the mosaic of the press manages to effect a complex many-leveled function of group-awareness and participation such as the book has never been able to perform.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 216
Year: 1964
Chapter:
News
Hopkins, for example, abandoned the corporate uses of language as social mask, or manner, using words and phrases as heuristic probes with which to explore and to restore the hidden sinews of English.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 175
Year: 1970
Today, with much greater speed-up of travel and information, the fragmentation of social life has reversed into corporate forms again.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 86
Year: 1970
One of the most prolific genres of our time has come from the return to the mask or image so necessary to the corporate life of business and politics.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 97
Year: 1970
Charles Chaplin assembled a mask made up of bookkeeper, music hall entertainer, gallant and romantic searcher, then with genius added a touch of Pavolva… His footwork he acquired from the Ballet Russe. This touch transformed all the other components of his image, creating an overall effect of artistic spirituality and lent great power to the crass everyday features of his mask. None of the components in his mask correspond to anything that was the private C. Chaplin. Rather he chose carefully…just those items which gave him maximum corporate appeal.
“Public and Private Sectors” (1964), pp 5-6
Year: 1964
The Beatles… have invented an image in which the relation of an individual and a group has been refocused for our time.
From 1964, exact attribution unclear
Year: 1964
The simple faith of the salesman in the irresistibility of his line (both talk and goods) now yields to the complex togetherness of the corporate posture, the process and the organization.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 216
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 189
Year: 1964
And now they are deserting the individual consumer-product in favor of the all-inclusive and never-ending process that is the Image of any great corporate enterprise.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 232
Year: 1964
TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 239
Year: 1964
Games are situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 245
Year: 1964
That is, technologies not only emerge from the unconscious but accumulate a sort of collective unconscious as corporate social fact.
Letter to Jonathan Miller, January 8, 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 315
Year: 1965
An information environment like ours is man-made. Media are, as it were, cultural or corporate masks.
Letter to Peter Drucker, October 24, 1966, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 338
Year: 1966
Electrically, the corporate human scale has become vast even as private identity shrinks to the pitiable.
“Technology and the Human Dimension. Interview with L. Forsdale” (1974), in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message (1989), p 21
Year: 1974
As societies once more become cohesive and corporate, the entire community can become an actor in a way that is normal in Oriental and non-Western societies in general.
“Roles, Masks, and Performances” (1971), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003), number 12, p 6
Year: 1971
Oh yes! Absolutely! And lovers don’t give a damn about appearances at any time in human history! So we’re moving out of the world of appearances. That is what Harvey Cox means by the “secular city.” The secular city was the visible, material city from which we could have a great deal of detachment. It apparently didn’t demand much involvement. The new city is one that demands a mystical involvement in the whole enterprise.
“Love”, in “Love”, Saturday Night, February (1967), p 8
Year: 1967
If you put on a corporate voice the moment you step outside it means that you put on the speech that belongs to your class. And we don’t do that. Therefore we don’t have a class system. Class has more to do with voice than it has to do with economics.
Carl Scharfe interview (1976), transcript p 4
Year: 1976